Karl... what a wonderful opportunity... Bell Labs has done so much for the
development of innovations... You are a lucky guy to have worked there...
and I bet you have a lot you could share with other designers...

I was talking with a young attractive gal who was attending the Protel
upgrade training in San Diego awhile back and she is working for JPL on a
Solar Sail design that they expect to deploy to study the feasibility of
using the Solar winds to travel to other planets.... I'm so jealous... I
wish I could do it all. I love aerospace and it seems like so much of my
career has just skirted the fringes of that field...

But I am content with the opportunity to just be among such an elite crowd
of talented folks and I can only hope some of it rubs off in the process...
:)

My dad had the opportunity to be a part of the Pioneer 10 space probe
development and it totally awed me that the boards and components he built
in a lab at UCSD are now billions of miles from our planet headed for a
distant rendezvous (albeit long after we have all passed into memory) with
Aldeberan, a star in the constellation Taurus the Bull. Funny, I guess it
has the distinction of being the very first Printed Circuit Card to escape
our Solar system...  Man I just realized that...

Dr. Walker Fillius at UCSD wrote me an e-mail after my dad passed away in
March of last year and shared a little known detail of my dad's time
there... It seems that many years in the future that the 'little green men'
of Aldeberan may be scratching their heads wondering what the Initials "WRB"
in etch on the corner of that PC board in the power supply on Pioneer 10
might mean.... They were my dad's initials...(mine too, I'm actually a
'Jr'.) but they may never know that.... but I do. :)

http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/pioneer10/


I bet there are countless stories from others like that but it was a special
inspiration to me to get involved in the industry... It's a great time to be
a PCB designer... we have a lot ahead of us to do... who knows what
challenges we will overcome, I think lead free is going to be a difficult
one frankly... but we keep watching and learning and going to work
everyday... eventually we shall see how it plays out...

In case you're interested, my dad's obit is still online...
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/obituaries/20040318-9999-1m18brooks.html


Best regards,


Bill Brooks - KG6VVP
PCB Design Engineer , C.I.D.+, C.I.I.
Tel: (760)597-1500 Ext 3772 Fax: (760)597-1510
e-mail:[log in to unmask]
http://www.dtwc.com
http://pcbwizards.com

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